Making the Most (and a Moose) in Jackson Hole

March 14, 2008 by Cathy Healy //

TETON VILLAGE, Wyo. – Arggggggggg! I’m a fair-weather skier and this is the fairest of days. The sky is blue and the powder is deep. My family is all over the mountain, but there is nowhere for me to ski!
Jackson offers only one easy green molehill of a slope that takes five minutes to come down—and that’s after a ten-minute wait in line. The next step up is a double blue peak that’s an Everest to me, given that I’ve only been on skis once in the past five years. So I had a choice: I could eat worms or I could enjoy what Jackson Hole Mountain Resort does offer. I ate worms. How’s that for stupid?
So here’s the lesson learned: Even on a family vacation, you’ve got to plan for yourself, too.
Next year, I plan to make the most of Jackson’s unique location. From the ski mountain, you can wander to Grand Teton National Park and over to Yellowstone National Park. So I’m going to sign up for wildlife tours in Yellowstone to catch a sight of wolves, or maybe take a cross-country ski tour of the Tetons, where if you’re lucky, you might see moose tracks.

Or, maybe you’ll just think it’s a moose.

One night in the hot tub, my nephew Nathan repeated stories told by one of his best friends, a large adventurer who is always getting in trouble with equipment because she fibs about her weight . . . like the time she went snowshoeing in the Tetons with her sister and a naturalist guide.
The storyteller sank into the snow while her sister and the guide skimmed ahead. They didn’t see her trip on a branch and flail endlessly to get on her feet. Eventually she caught up with them, and on the way back, the guide suddenly spotted where she had fallen. “Look!” he said. “There’s a moose bed!”
Sitting together with cold beers in hand, we laugh and tell jokes on ourselves. Which is why family vacations are precious, and why I wonder whether I will see a moose next year, or be the moose.
More information: Learn more about the animals in the park with Wildlife Expeditions from the Teton Science Schools, whose board of directors has included National Geographic magazine’s Editor-in-Chief Emeritus, Bill Allen; Check out the Jackson Hole Nordic Center to get updates about winter activities at the mountain.

Cathy Healy once skied every area in the Andes. She didn’t speak much Spanish and she brought her own, four-foot, lesson-number-two skis. As her sister-in-law, Jean Bailey Healy, a superb skier from Wyoming, said, “Cathy proves that you don’t have to be a jock to have great adventures.”
Photo: Abby Phoenix via Flickr

Sinterklaas and Santa Claus: An Ocean Apart

December 24, 2007 by Cathy Healy //

Sinterklaas and Santa Claus: An Ocean Apart

December 24, 2007 10:00 AM | Comments (2)

Contributing writer Cathy Healy was in Amsterdam this year to see some of the festivities that surround the arrival of Sinterklaas – or the Dutch Santa Claus.

If you’re naughty, not nice in the Netherlands, Santa’s helpers will stuff you in a sack and take you back to Spain. This is a threat? A free trip to Spain in December! But why Spain, I wonder? The real St. Nicholas was a bishop in Turkey and his bones are buried in Italy. A holdover from when Spain ruled Holland, during the Elizabethan era? But that’s another mystery to search out.
Today’s mystery lies in the Sinterklaas traditions, experiencing which, on a scale of 0-10, hovers around 7 for culture sleuths. If Sinter and Santa started out as the same saint, how did they end up so different?
Sinter is welcomed to Amsterdam in mid-November, before our Thanksgiving, and leaves on his birthday, December 6, after his helpers have spent the night, climbing down chimneys to leave gifts. The Dutch separate Sinterklaas and gifts from Christmas and Christ. (I like that. Why should we bundle everything into one single day?)
My Dutch friends think they have the answer. They believe that Santa Claus was created by Coca-Cola, while Sint was a real man who is widely emulated for his gift-giving. Coca-Cola? Nope, that’s an urban legend, I tell them. They laugh and we sip our hot chocolates. It is December 3 and we’re at Corlaer College near Nijkerk, where a crowd of good little boys and girls of the staff are greeting Sinterklaas and his helpers, who are called Black Piets. We’re fascinated.

Many of the children are costumed in vivid Elizabethan-style silks, with black smeared across their faces, like the Piets, and they are thrilled, scared, and excited. Sinterklaas is no jolly ol’ St. Nick—that’s the U.S. tradition. The Dutch Sint clearly is a high church official garbed in cardinal red and white with a tall prelate’s hat and a heavy gold cross.
“Piet, Piet, Piet,” says Sinter, while his helpers dance and prance and lead the gleeful children in song.
I feel very uncomfortable, as I look at blue-eyed Black Piets, done up in blackface. The Dutch-Dutch look at Black Piets and think “chimney soot” (the most recent story) or they think about the Ethiopian boy who was liberated from slavery by St. Nicholas. Still, I wonder what the Surinam-Dutch, who immigrated to the Netherlands a generation or so ago, think about Black Piets.
Later, I’m encouraged to hear that a few weeks ago when Sinterklaas sailed into Amsterdam with 600 Piets, some had white faces. Will there be more in 2008 on Nov. 16, when Sinterklaas returns? And real black-faced Piets? And brown faces? I wonder whether the newly multi-ethnic Dutch, who have been famous for their tolerance for hundreds of years, will evolve their traditions and have St. Nicholas arrive from his real home in Turkey, thus saluting the Turkish-Dutch.
In the meantime, I’m wondering how to return to the Netherlands next November to join the Sinterklaas parade, and watch the Piets scaling walls of the Bijenkorf department store on Dam Square, and marvel as Sinterklaas and his white stallion, Amerigo, rehearse roof-walking on the roof of the NEMO science center. (Another mystery: What happened to Amerigo? How did we end up with Rudolph, the happiest reindeer of all?)
And now, back home in Wyoming with Santa only a few days away from my coming down family’s chimney, I wonder if he will bring me a digital videocam so I can shoot a clip of next year’s Sinter caper for this blog.
Santa, I’ve tried to be nice, but you know, I’d kind of like to go to Spain.
Photos: above, the Netherlands Board of Tourism and Marketing; below, Bob Hofman, ICT&E

NG Traveler: Climb Inside Amsterdam

December 12, 2007 by Cathy Healy //

Climb Inside Amsterdam

December 12, 2007 12:00 PM | Comments (1)

When Intelligent Travel contributing writer Cathy Healy decided it was time to divulge her favorite hotel—and hotelier—in Amsterdam, we leaped at hearing the scoop…

Long, lanky Mark Bakker is dangling out of the window of my room, helping hang the repainted Hotel Prinsenhof sign. I’m in the south-facing breakfast room with its wall of windows bright with silvery November light. Do I look like a Vermeer painting as I read my e-mail?
The rippled glass in the tall panes of the hotel windows are from the 1820s. Vermeers hang in the Rijksmuseum, alongside the Rembrandts and other Dutch masters, about a ten-minute walk to the left. The Van Gogh Museum is three minutes beyond. The Amstel River flows two minutes to the right. Straight ahead, across the Prinsen Canal (Prinsengracht), is Rembrandt Square, a heart in a multi-hearted city that is a masterwork itself.
A former radio journalist, Mark is my interpreter of Amsterdam and the Dutch. He is the manager of the one-star hotel which has ten rooms, some of which overlook the canal, some with bathrooms down the hall. I have a canal view and a bathroom in my room. Price: 84 Euros.

Ann Williams, a National Geographic magazine writer, discovered the Prinsenhof on a vacation with her husband. “You must stay there and you must stay in Room 4, which has flower boxes,” said organized Ann. “And be sure to say ‘Hello’ to Mark.”
I sent a hello and asked a favor. Did Mark know how I could track my Dutch roots? He rooted around, found the head of the historical society in my ancestors’ town, and made an appointment for me.
That was in 1997. Mark didn’t hear from me again until 2000, when I traveled to Europe with my nephew Brian, 16, who reported when we got home: “We started our trip in Amsterdam with our friend, Mark.”
This is my fourth time in Amsterdam. I’m still at the Prinsenhof—in Room 1 this time. Not much has changed. Mark is still lanky. He still wields paintbrushes in a constant battle against easily chipped, antique paint. He still takes off from mid-January through mid-March to India. He still is forthright. Amsterdam opened a cruise ship terminal a few years ago, but experience shows that the Prinsenhof is not suited for the passengers. “They travel with too much luggage, and the average age is higher,” he says.
What Mark means is that when you’re inside the Prinsenhof, you are inside old Amsterdam, with stairways pitched at 45-degree angles and with stairs so narrow you have to climb sideways. So of course cruisers and backpackers and businessmen and film producers and college professors all want to stay here—and to enjoy Mark, the master hotelman, their guide to life outside the entrance: a double Dutch door, naturally.